Little more than a military outpost when it was founded in 1719, Baton Rouge still played an important role in the kindred politics of the colony. The reason for this was the arrival of Orlando, the Brujah elder who had sought to turn New Orleans into a new Carthage, in 1784. Without a significantly large population to sustain a brood and trapped in the city by the fierce Acadian Sabbat, Orlando was forced to attack his foes indirectly for most of the first century of his unlife in Louisiana.
The city gained prominance however when the capital was moved here from New Orleans in 1849, a state of affairs which was interupted briefly by the Civil War and Reconstruction, but which has persisted otherwise to the present day. This fact has allowed Orlando a much greater leeway to influence the state and he has tried to use this to his best advantage, encouraging state laws limiting the power of New Orleans civic authorities and backing politicians like Huey Long, who both hurt the Lasombra power base with populist politics and who have a distaste for the Crescent City.
With the turn of the century came the discovery of oil and natural gas deposits in the vicinity of the city, which attracted many petrochemical companies to invest in it, giving a further boost both to its size and its economy. The benefits of this compounded until reaching their height during the oil boom of the 70s, which unfortunately marked the end of the most protracted offensive that Orlando has been able to muster and from which he is now trying to recover.
The latter half of the century has seen the arrival of many other Camarilla vampires to the city, a fact which both pleases and concerns the elder Prince. Many are drawn by the same interests which he seeks to exploit but don't share his obsession with the city downriver. Meanwhile, Baton Rouge continues to grow and come into its own, the bastion of Camarilla power in Louisiana and the first line of defense against the Sabbat horde to the south.